For the 150th anniversary of camera art, Houston maps a world of images

No one can put a date on the cave drawings at Lascaux or on the first drumbeat. But photography has a birthdate of sorts, 1839, the year it was ushered loudly into the world in a clamor of patents and the claims of two separate inventors, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre in France and William Henry Fox Talbot in England. For that reason 1989 is being marked as a sesquicentennial -- 150 years in which photographers have remade the world in their own images.

All through the calendar, museums in the U.S. and abroad will be mounting shows that will attempt to...